Back in the days, the role of the CIO was relatively clear: the focus was on deploying, managing, and maintaining IT systems across the organization. The CIO’s responsibilities started to blur when end-users became more tech-savvy - around the millenium. Reasons were that ‘they can now get their own technology and don’t need IT to do it for them’. This even led to the much-repeated “death of the CIO meme”.

There are several metrics in use to determine incident management success. Two of them are MTTD and MTTR, which we will be discussing in this piece.

In a distributed IT environment, there are a lot of moving parts, and all of them need to be monitored to ensure everything is working as it should. The rise of more complex infrastructures interweaving the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid architectures makes this a challenge. To make sure you have adequate visibility, you need an IT observability strategy.

Topology is a multilayered map showing how everything in the IT environment is related. It's similar to Google Maps, which gives you a bird's eye view into an area and how everything is interconnected. Also, in Google Maps, you can see how traffic is flowing and which intersections may be causing bottlenecks. A view into topology allows similar visibility. You can see how components of an IT system are laid out to interact with each other.

Imagine you have a hole in your car's tire. To fix it quickly and get on your way, you apply a patch. Then it happens again. You apply another patch. Before you know it, you're driving on the highway and you blow a tire. The risk was always there. You were simply hiding it because you didn't solve the problem. We see this often when it comes to IT issues. Teams take a band-aid approach to fixing problems without addressing the underlying causes.

As IT environments become more complex, enterprises running business-critical workloads in dynamic environments need to ensure the performance and reliability of their applications. This is where observability comes in. Observability is the ability of the internal states of a system to be inferred from external outputs. Without it, your team’s productivity could be greatly diminished.

Say you’re looking for a smart product to detect anomalies in your organization’s IT environment. A sales rep drops by and shows you all kinds of great artificial intelligence (AI) features with fancy-sounding algorithms. It sounds very impressive and seems like there is a lot of very valuable AI in the product. But, in fact, the opposite is true. This is a manual AI product wrapped in a deceiving jacket. Let me tell you more.

In this age of digital transformation, any issues with your IT infrastructure can cause major disruptions to your business. On top of this, IT environments that support critical business applications continue to get more complex and dynamic. As failures, outages, and incidents increase in volume and cost, the risk of an outage within your company becomes a very expensive one.

Does your work involve a lot of ITOps Monitoring? If so, chances are you have developed a roadmap for 2021 that addresses digital business disruption, application and infrastructure changes, and the ongoing global pandemic… And here’s an opportunity to incorporate expert advice into your plan.

The monitoring and incident management process is often chaotic and time-consuming for organizations. However, there is a better way to approach IT incidents and make your existing process function better. Topology and relationship-based observability solutions take the incident management process from chaotic to structured. Let’s look into how StackState’s solution improves and speeds up the incident resolution process.